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The interesting thing though is not that China is not a stranger to blatant stealing to make rip-off games. This has been going on for like, since the 90s?

What is interesting though, is that the giant Blizzard actually bothered to sue a Chinese company, going through all that infamous corrupted Chinese bureaucracy. Either there is somehow a lot of money to go after, and there has to be a lot considering some of it must go into local politicians' pockets, or there is something I don't get here.

Why would they want to go after a simple mobile dev like that? Are they planning to make their own Warcraft mobile game for the Chinese market?

They are being sued in California, which would likely indicate the company in question messed up and has foreign assets (which is likely since they sell the game in the US), or has exposure which would make a ruling against them problematic. Blizzard will either get the money, or the company will become toxic for any buyers who have an international presence.

"You and Google further agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal or state courts located within the county of Santa Clara, California to resolve any legal matter arising from or relating to this Agreement or Your relationship with Google under this Agreement, except that You agree that Google will be allowed to apply for injunctive relief in any jurisdiction. If You are accepting the Agreement on behalf of a United States government entity, then the following applies instead of the foregoing: the parties agree to remain silent regarding governing law and venue."

70% of WoWs playerbase is in China. It's basically where they make money on the game now, and anything that messes with that is a problem for them. Ten years ago when the majority of their revenue was in the West they probably wouldn't have bothered.

There are a lot of reasons I have contempt for China. The fact that they're perfecting the model of a dystopian surveillance state is chief among them. But the thing that really gets me is the wholesale theft of IP and technology. Artists pour their heart and soul into their work and someone on the other side of the world just rips it because they want to make a fast buck.

I think everyone agrees in that art-wise Blizzard is still top tier. BfA sucks balls but the design and ambientation of the new zones are better than ever. Overwatch is going downhill for many reasons but the design of the characters and the maps is still miles ahead of the competition.

BfA isn't bad across the board though, the encounter design for instance is great, the individual story set pieces are as well, stuff like how a raid or dungeon do a good job as end caps to stories. They did really fudge up some characters though, like Yrel, who in an expansion that is all about strong female characters, they took one of the few newer ones that the majority of the community loved and turned her into Joseph Stalin. Slyvanas has been messed up since WOTLK and I am dreading the day they reveal why she is being shady "for the greater good" of us all, groan.

Really the only things I'd change mechanic wise is to make Azerite more alt friendly, as some of the new Heart Essences are a real pain to unlock on multiple characters.

Legion had a lot of difficult, entertaining fights that didn't have a lot of simultaneous complexity. BfA took the complexity up significantly for the big bosses of each raid. Zul and G'huun are both fairly complex fights. BoD was more reasonable but Rasta is pretty crazy.

I know this sub hates Blizzard these days but they have always had some of the best artists in the industry working for them, don't like to see such hard work being ripped off.

It's not the artists fault, but Blizzard has come by this criticism honestly. Or in some cases dishonestly as the case may be.

Their quality of games has been slipping and they got greedier. After a decade plus of using their fan base to bully gamers who dared to play anything competing with their beloved games they are facing reprisal as they managed to start losing the loyalty of their incredibly devoted fanbase.

There is no part about this that isn't Blizzards fault. They lived by their rep to try and oppress any competitors, and now they are facing the backlash of their actions both past and current. I'm sure Battleborn is thumbing its nose at them from the grave right now as a victim of their weaponization of their community.

I got tired as hell about hearing people overly harp on Blizzard games despite loving Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, etc. I didn't really like WOW but I was willing to acknowledge it as the great game it is, just not my tastes. But Blizzard has been slowly losing it's soul for a long time now and it's been showing in it's games and it's treatment of it's communities.

The Diablo 3 debacles, like all of them. There are so many, seriously, wtf. Then leaving Diablo 3 to rot. Worst of all the finished and final Diablo 3 feels more like Marvel Heroes did (before they killed themselves with a consolization patch lol) than it does a Diablo game. Ironically Path of Exiles feels far more like Diablo than the modern Diablo game.

Starcraft 2 being cut into 3 pieces and then delivering a lower quality experience and far worse story than SC 1. I can expand on this considerably if necessary. Cheeses galore, even used to win grandmasater tournaments.

HOTS was actually a really unique idea (a rarity for blizzard who lives off of polishing stolen ideas ideas that inspired them. It also had alot of potential. However Blizzard did not believe in HOTS and so they invested minimally in it's foundation. This resulted in severe engine problems for much of the game's life span and still limits it today. However it gets worse because Blizzard then suddenly noticed it existed again, tried to forced Esports on it because Esports is totally the right fit for a MOBA aimed at a causal demographic, and then when it didn't work out they abandoned the scene in the worst way possible leaving people with no work suddenly because they intentionally led people on. They also started out with the highest monetization of any MOBA by over 30% and it only got worse when they added lootboxes. (I ran spreadsheets on this).

Overwatch is a good game, but a frustratingly flawed game. It's designed around having compelling characters that you want to play but to play well you have to switch out and cannot just play what you want. 1 person ignoring this to have more fun makes the whole team lose. Great for a competitive mode, bad for casual play. Severe balance issues throughout it's lifespan. Lootboxes on top with a few major controversies. It's also just a twist on TF 2.

Blizzard was accused of bullying and discrimination earlier this year.

They got busted paying zero taxes and yet getting a tax refund because they hired someone to go to another country and lobby their laws so they could create a tax loophole via usage of a shell company.

They announced record revenues, immediately laid off tons of workers, then hired many workers immediately after.

if your problem with sc2 is cheese working at high levels then i guess you never watched high level brood war - in both games the threat of cheese is what prevents every match from turning into a boring turtlefest due to greedy builds.

if your problem with sc2 is cheese working at high levels then i guess you never watched high level brood war - in both games the threat of cheese is what prevents every match from turning into a boring turtlefest due to greedy builds.

The fact that this is now the defense shows how thoroughly the attempts to defend SC 2 cheese failed. For the longest time it was "but cheeses don't work in high level play" and then when that grandmaster tournament was won via cheeses people changed their argument to the next most convenient thing, which you are expressing now.

It should be noted my comment did not suggest SC 1 did not have cheese. I only said SC 2 was a much lower quality experience with a far worse story. Then I used a separating sentence to separate the thoughts. THEN I mentioned the cheeses as a separate thought. Regardless of whether cheeses were present in SC 1 nobody likes loosing to a cheese that's basically just a RPS of "did you guess what cheese I was going to use in some cases and it contributed to SC 2 being less well received in a much more informer internet age.

The old school zerg rush is one of the most famous cheeses of all time that eventually got nerfed because it was far too effective.

SC 1 and Diablo 2 both had very good stories. Warcraft 3 was a good video game story for it's time, though it doesn't hold up as well today. The story elements in Overwatch are actually so well done (in general) that the fact it was just a TF 2 clone is pretty disappointing. If they made an Overwatch themed MMORPG I'd be down for that.

WOW has been inconsistent, sometimes it has good stories and sometimes it's dumb :P. But considering they've been making new stories for that game for 10+ years that's kind of expected that it would vary.

As someone that enjoys other mediums where storytelling is involved I disagree but I suppose it could be subjective. D2 is my fav game of all time, I have played it so many times but I say that it has almost no story. It can be summed up in 1 minute so it doesn't really count

This is the stupidest argument. "A hobbit accidentally ends up with an all powerful evil ring that he destroys while evading a powerful evil with the help of his party." "A young kid has his parents die, gets trained in mystical ways by a muppet and an old wise man, and helps a group of insurgents overthrow the existing dictatorship by throwing the leader in a well." Shit stories 0/10. You could also just shorten these to "heroes journey" lol.

You can make any story a super short summation and you can make any job sound easy, it all depends on how reductive you get. A story does also not have to be complex to be good. A Scarlet Letter for example is not a complex story, it's a very simple tale that can easily be summarized. The only thing that matters is the impact on the audience at the end of the day.

Launch sucked. Real money auction house sucked. Ever since reaper of souls the game is in great shape!

Starcraft 2 is still a fantastic game. Yes maybe not exactly the game old SC fans hoped for, but it's one the best RTS out there. But it's aging, and the playerbase is waning. Which is normal for a game that old.

Blizzard was accused of bullying and discrimination earlier this year

Who hasn't? Not diminishing it, but this year pretty much everyone has been accused of a lot. This isn't unique to ActiBlizz.

They got busted paying zero taxes and yet getting a tax refund

Also, not just ActiBlizz. they're just using every single loophole they find, and guess what? Every single big corporation does the exact same thing. Because we (our elected governments) allowed it. Once again, they are not unique to ActiBlizz, not even just gaming.

They announced record revenues, immediately laid off tons of workers, then hired many workers immediately after.

Nothing you say is wrong here, but it grossly oversimplifies the situation. When planning projects and products, you plan years ahead, and estimate how many people you need, and what kind of people you need. They needed devs on core franchises, and less community managers and other supporting staff.

They determined their goals for the next few years, and rearranged their staff according to those needs. That is exactly what you should do as a company.

I will not defend them for having the worst timing of announcing the layoffs. That is just completely boneheaded.

Overall, your sentiment rings true. Blizzard is in a bad spot, their content is drying up, their newest releases aren't as sustainable as their previous entries were, and their release calendar is scarily empty. Overwatch is plateau-ing, HotS is dying, and WoW isn't exactly at it's peak. Their company is under valid criticism. And there needs to be a major shake-up to get them out of their downward spiral.

However, a lot of your points feel like you just wanted a bigger list of issues. Maybe I'm wrong, but having 4-5 reasons to signify the decline of a company is more than enough.

Starcraft 2 is still a fantastic game. Yes maybe not exactly the game old SC fans hoped for, but it's one the best RTS out there. But it's aging, and the playerbase is waning. Which is normal for a game that old.

Being one of the best RTS out there in an age where RTS is dead is not much of an accomplishments unfortunately. It's just a worse game competitively than others and for single player and story that game is a damn travesty. They took the super nuanced and badass Kerrigan who looked uncomfortably monstrous while having her retain shreds of humanity and they turned her into a sexualized damsel in distress with exoskeleton stripper boots. She's "the most powerful being in the universe" but she gets repeatedly saved by Jimmy who is nothing more than a broken drunk. Just to double down on that they even have you beat her 1 on 1. The story is just bad all around and then ends with DBZ nonsense and an unearned faux happy ending. It's also piss easy. On the default difficulty I actually destroyed the unbeatable bases.

The only good things about the story at all is Tychus, and I thought the upgrade system as you progressed the campaign was a good touch. But that's it.

I'm not addressing the rest as it all basically comes down to minimizing it. "but everyone's doing it" or "it's more complicated than that". You try to loop back around to appear more reasonable at the end but this is just bargaining to try and make you sound more reasonable. You're almost there, 2 more stages and you'll get to acceptance.

I'm going to repeat something Jim Sterling said "If you can't be profitable making video games without doing these things, maybe you don't deserve to be in the video game business." Indies can be successful without doing this kind of stuff and make some AAA or close quality games. There is no excuse. Stop making excuses for them.

I mean being "inspired" by GW is certainly not the same thing as lifting assets (which is what a lot of mobile games do), but to then go on and steal quite liberally and repeatedly for close to a decade. Kind of bullshit.

I don't think Warcraft took much from gw, they are just fantasy tropes. The Zerg are pretty shockingly similar to Tyranids imo, but maybe there are only so many ways to make a biological, hive-mind-having, space faring, mysterious, rapid-evolution-based lifeform. I still think you could take any Tyranid lore and sub Zerg for Tyranid (or vice versa) and it would take a real fan to spot it

Good point. I agree, I suppose it's just a sci-fi trope at this point. Like I said, there's only so many ways to make it work and be unique and despite the similarities Starship troopers, Zerg, and Tyranids all have SOME differences (although I can't really think of anything beyond appreances). But damn you gotta admit even the story lines behind them are similar - fight uphill centuries long war, discover the secret of the hivemind, kill the controlling organism, and mop up. Hivefleet Behemoth, Bugs, and Zerg all follow that arc.

Well, it's based on something we already have a pretty decent fear of in real life from fighting things like wasps, ants, termites, etc... it just sort of puts the size imbalance on the other side and puts them all on the same team together while amping up the bug pheremone control stuff into magical psionic powers.

Dungeons and Dragons explored giant insect colonies too fairly early on, though it was never as much of a focus.

what I will never understand is if you cant enforce copyright laws in china why arent a lot of these companies with a lot of money to spend making their own "ripoff" of their own games specificly for the chinese market. If you cant stop them atleast make sure you are still the one profiting from your game over there even if the conditions are different. I feel like it could be really beneficial long term.

There are so many such games on the market that steals the looks of assets straight from Warcraft, WoW, or Dota 2. Sometimes they go a step further and even copy "gameplay" feature. I remember one such game had a copy paste of Shadowfiend that also did the auto-ult when it died.

I mean it depends on the quality of the game. The company that stole Diablo's IP and made a working Diablo clone for phones is possibly more valuable to Blizzard than the one that made some gacha game that just uses sprites and images but offers nothing of value.

world of kings and this other game made by the company who was contracted by blizzard to make the diablo mobile game are ok i suppose?!

i've only recently entered the mobile gaming market and was actually very surprised about the quality these games have. world of kings, maybe a rip-off of wow, but it does have a fantastic presentation and probably a way better new player experience than wow.

I'm not a lawyer, so i don't dare to jump to conclusions. but looking at some of the artwork, it's heavily influenced by wow's orc and human architecture. just go ahead and create an orc, so you can see what's on the loading screen. it's quite obvious.